This New York Times article taught me a new word -- or at least, a new concept: the Muvee, short for multiple-user virtual environment experiential simulator.

I guess you need a short explanation. Here it is.

Lately Chandreka Wright, 13, has been chatting with friends online while playing a computer game. This is not exactly atypical behavior for a seventh grader, except that she is chatting and playing during her science class at the James P. Timilty Middle School in Boston.

She and her classmates are part of a research project designed by scientists at George Mason University and the Harvard University Graduate School of Education that relies on what they call multiple-user virtual environment experiential simulators, or Muvees. Players log in, adopt an identity and join up with other players to gather information and solve problems in a three-dimensional virtual world brimming with people, places and things.

Modeled after popular multiplayer online games like Microsoft's Asheron's Call and Sony's EverQuest series, the simulations are meant to encourage higher-order reasoning among science students.